Nokia Lumia 710 Hardware
Update: read our Hands on: Nokia Lumia 800 review.
The baby of the Nokia Windows Phone range, the Nokia Lumia 710 promises a cheap and cheerful handset with a top end experience.
It's got looks that seem aimed at a younger demographic – so can Nokia tear the teenage masses away from BBM and iPhone lust and over to the Windows Phone way?
The handset certainly doesn't feel bad in the hand – it's made from a smooth plastic which looks good in the white matt finish, although it's also available in a shinier black finish that seemed to attract fingerprints and smears like nobody's business.
It's not overly heavy and although it won't win any accolades for being the slimmest handset on the market, the Nokia Lumia 710 is easily small enough to sit anonymously in a pocket or small bag.
If you spend a lot of time trying out the highest end smartphones, the Nokia 710's screen is going to seem a little pokey. But at 3.7-inches, it's more than adequate for most users and not bad quality, although on occasion images did seem a little jaggedy.
The screen is a ClearBlack display, which means it should be able to handle direct sunlight with no glare and you'll still be able to see what's going on. Sadly, there are no skylights in Nokia World so we can't vouch for that just yet.
We're not massive fans of the physical buttons under the touchscreen; they poke out and feel a little uncomfortable under the finger, and the long slim almost business-like buttons don't really sit brilliantly with the less formal design of the handset overall.
Also notable on the front of the handset is the proximity sensor, not to be mistaken for a front-mounted camera; none of the Nokia Windows Phones have these at present.
Other buttons to play with are the volume slider on the side of the handset, just along from the camera shutter button.
And on top, there's the standby button next to a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The back plays host to the Nokia 710's 5MP camera with single LED flash, as well as a speaker grille.
Playing to Nokia's long tradition of interchangeable phone fascias, the Nokia Lumia 710 offers five interchangeable multi-coloured back panels; we like the turquoisey blue with the white body but hey, you can make your own design decisions here.
The Nokia Lumia 710 runs Windows Phone 7.5 – no surprise there – so you can look forward to that tiled home page, the extensive people hub and threaded messaging, among other Microsoft-made delights. You might want to check out our Windows Phone 7.5 Mango review for our full thoughts on the software.
The handset, although erring on the mid-range side of things, handled the software nicely; swiping between screens and running multiple apps didn't seem to give the handset any trouble – no doubt thanks to the lovely 1.4GHz single-core Qualcomm processor keeping things ticking along nicely.
It's no surprise, given the relatively low price point, but still a shame that the Nokia 710 only comes with 8GB of storage – space that will be quickly taken up with bits and pieces, unless you make full use of the streamed content available.
Things like photos can be uploaded to Facebook and other social networks at the click of a menu-based option, so there's no need necessarily to store them on your handset, and you can make use of Nokia Music to save room on songs – more on that below.
As premium partner, Nokia has made a couple of sneaky additions to the Windows Phone 7.5 apps, however. As well as the now-standard line up, you'll get Nokia Drive and Nokia Music on the Finnish Windows Phones.
Nokia Drive is a fully featured sat nav featuring turn-by-turn navigation, as Nokia reps were very keen to point out. Even in the depths of the Nokia World convention centre, it picked up our location pretty quickly and the 3D maps loaded in an adequately short time.
It's not exactly a beautiful interface, unfortunately; a lot of greys and formal Nokia-style text in play here, but it's functional and quick which, when you're lost in the vales of East London, is what counts.
Nokia Music, meanwhile, offers a little more than Microsoft's Zune Player. You can stream music on the handset via a radio mix or built playlists. You can also create offline playlists for when you're flying or going underground and signal will be limited.
It looks the part, taking its design cues from Microsoft's own apps; unfortunately with limited hands on time in a noisy trade show, we weren't able to test out the quality of the service. More on that in our full Nokia Lumia 710 review, so stay tuned.
The camera is one of the few major differences between the Nokia Lumia 710 and its better specced sibling, the Nokia Lumia 800. With a 5MP sensor and a lesser flash, it's not going to win Nokia any awards, but we found it quick and simple to use, with the touch-to-focus function working well and the physical shutter button a welcome addition.
The resulting pictures were fairly bright even without the flash, and our brief video recording session didn't give us anything to complain about. Nokia's spec sheet claims 720p HD video – we're sure it's not lying.
As for internet, over a Wi-Fi network with very heavy traffic, it still managed to load TechRadar in an acceptable time; we may have been tutting after a three or four second delay, but we can't tell how much the connection is to blame for that.
You can't really read much on with the website in full-screen mode, but pinch to zoom rendered quickly and smoothly, so that's no great shakes.
It's always hard to form an opinion on Windows Phone hardware, because Microsoft's specifications mean they're all incredibly similar.
But this isn't a bad mid-range attempt from Nokia, the company has clearly called on its strengths in that arena and come out with a handset we wouldn't be ashamed to call our own.
But whether it can handle more intense multi-tasking and if the battery life and connections can live up to the hefty streaming Nokia seems to be pushing its users towards, we don't know.
We'll be putting the Nokia Lumia 710 through its paces in our full review soon, but until then you can colour us cautiously optimistic.
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